


Wine Red and Rose Red

by prodigy



Category: Fate/Zero
Genre: Do-Over, Dubious Consent, M/M, Psychological Horror, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-30
Updated: 2016-09-30
Packaged: 2018-08-18 11:54:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8161247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prodigy/pseuds/prodigy
Summary: There's a new student. There must be. Kayneth El-Melloi Archibald hasn't learned his lessons.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Relia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Relia/gifts).
  * Translation into Русский available: [Красный, как вино и роза](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9853718) by [WTFFate2017](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WTFFate2017/pseuds/WTFFate2017)



There's a new student. There must be. Kayneth notices the student at one of the rearmost, upper desks midway through his lecture and thinks, half-absent, that he would have remembered this one if he'd seen him before. He has a decent number in his first-year lecture, certainly. It's a good-sized class. It's not so good-sized as to lose a whole student among their number, like a page misplaced in a sheaf of papers. Least of all this one, who in a glimpse stamps his image into Kayneth's memory.

This is an easy task. Kayneth has a good memory. He remembers the majority of his students' faces, even after they've left his class, even after they've left school; the nature of being a teacher is in becoming aware that you represent little more than a checkpoint on a thousand individual roads, and not generally a welcome one, either. They roll on ahead of you; they stretch out behind you. Every so often a student will even surpass you completely, blowing right by on that divine wind that carries him or her on to some higher place.

But that doesn't happen very often. Most of Kayneth Archibald's students are going nowhere.

(Near the front, the petulant low-born boy with the bobbed hair fidgets in his seat and leans back with an expression of obvious boredom. Kayneth ignores him.)

At the end of his lecture he opens the floor to questions. While he waits, he scans the room with a flick of his eyelashes for the new student: surely a face he can find again. A tall boy. A young man, more like. Younger than Sola-Ui. Attractive--very--but more than that, sort of wildly beautiful: like every strand on his dark head has somehow blown into place in this tousled, petaline arrangement. Women put hours into attempting such an effect, Kayneth is aware. Probably not boys taking his class.

But he can't remember where the boy was sitting, and out of the corner of his eye he can tell that Waver Velvet has stopped fidgeting long enough to prepare a question and put up his hand. So Kayneth forgets the new student for the time being and braces himself, with ground teeth, for yet another contribution from the knowledgeable Mr. Velvet; in the back of his mind he reminds himself, half an hour until class is over. I'm meeting Sola-Ui for lunch.

* * *

Sola-Ui's working on her sandwich while Kayneth talks, bread pinned neatly between four fingers. She has this way of eating anything that never drops any crumbs. This is inexplicably desirable and has the effect of distracting him from whatever he was saying to her, but then again, many things do. For instance: Sola's fingernails, tipped in white today. Kayneth likes them with the French manicure; if he were a woman, he imagines he would do his nails that way, but this is an odd line of thinking and he leaves it be.

"--I have a new student, I think," he changes the topic, prodding the remains of his salad with his fork. "A latecomer."

She takes a sip of her sherry and settles her idle, skeptical gaze on him. "You think?"

It's an odd thing to be uncertain about, yes. Her scrutiny is uncomfortable; Kayneth glances away and says, "Yes. He just turned up, but the department hasn't told me anything. I suppose he could be a trespasser, but I doubt it."

"A bright and talented trespasser, one hopes," says Sola-Ui.

"I wouldn't know," says Kayneth: "I haven't heard him say anything." But this is a mistake, maybe a little too much detail or admitting he's dwelling this much on a boy he hasn't spoken to; he's aware of the awkward silence. This is the wrong way to get Sola's attention.

But Sola-Ui speaks up: "Oh, I think I know who you're talking about."

"You do?" Immediately he pictures Sola talking to the student, in her pencil skirt, and is distracted by sudden, unpleasant anxiety. Explicable anxiety, with a fiancee and a young man who looks like that.

But she just shrugs it off: "Yes. Irish?" Sola-Ui's family is Anglo-Irish, but more or less everyone at the Clocktower has forgiven them for it. "Fine-looking lad, isn't he? I don't know him, but I've seen him." Which floods Kayneth Archibald with at least two kinds of relief; at this rate, he was beginning to wonder if he was going mad.

* * *

He picks the young Irishman out by sight before lecture begins, while students are still all shuffling in and taking their places. (He can always pick Waver Velvet out, much to his own consternation. Even Waver's movements have their own irritating signature in Kayneth's peripheral vision.)

The new student is looking down at his notes when Kayneth espies him the first time, but for the rest of the lecture he's attentive, which makes it hard to eye him without crossing a line. Not that it matters. He resolves to put the student out of mind and ask the assistant for his name the next time he's in the department office.

Which should be just after his own office hours--joy. But just after Kayneth settles into his mahogany-furnished office for two hours of what he considers to be a professor's most onerous obligation, the Irish student comes to see him. He ducks in tousled head-first, then the rest of him, with a casual grace that Kayneth almost resents on sight; this is a young man who has never worried about where to put his hands, Kayneth can tell. He stands with his books under one arm, head cocked to one side--deferential, but easy--and he looks hopefully down at Kayneth at his desk.

Kayneth stares up at him. _May I help you?_ is written into his eyebrows.

“Hello, sir,” says the student. “Can I sit down?”

There is no reason to refuse him. Kayneth motions to the chair opposite and the boy settles in, crossing his legs. He smiles. “I need to add myself to the class,” he says, “and I don’t know how.”

To Kayneth’s annoyance, he can no longer remember what it was he was planning to read. So he folds his arms and says simply--what _should_ he say? He should say, _Take it up with the Registrar_. He says: “What’s your name?”

“Diarmuid ua Duibhne.” His tongue and teeth glide over the Gaelic. An odd name, Kayneth thinks--he has an intuitive sense of how to spell it, probably creditable to Sola-Ui. He ought to recognize if it belongs to one of the families, and it doesn’t. But Diarmuid ua Duibhne’s body is lit up with circuits. Kayneth can tell at this range. “If I can ask, sir--how would you like me to address you?”

Kayneth’s wiser students call him Lord El-Melloi; his stupider ones call him Professor. He regards Diarmuid over the width of the desk. “What you’re doing is fine,” he says. “You need to speak with the Registrar. Was there something else?”

Diarmuid ua Duibhne holds himself terribly still in his chair: still and straight-spined. His brow furrows. This is a handsome cast on him too, as a matter of fact; everything seems to be. God in Heaven. Is this what one is given to expect from the youth in these times? “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know very much about this subject. I was hoping you could guide me.”

“It is not my job to discover the contents of your mind,” says Kayneth. “If you have a concrete question--” ‘Mr. ua Duibhne’ seems out of the question. His mind slides completely off ‘Diarmuid.’ “If you have a concrete question about the material I can answer you. Otherwise--” He lets that trail off meaningfully.

Upbraided and chastened, Diarmuid lets his shoulders sink, along with the rest of his posture. His eyes go down, so his expression is all eyelashes and contrition--and that mole on his cheek. No, freckle. It hardly matters. Kayneth sits and waits for him to deliver an apology--which he does, “I’m sorry, sir”--and to remove himself from Kayneth’s office. This takes him an additional moment, as his gaze sweeps up again and he says: “Thank you for seeing me.”

That doesn’t merit a reply. Kayneth offers none and instead watches Diarmuid go--with a slight bow to Kayneth--and marvels again at the lustre of his magic circuits. Maybe a by-blow of the Nuada-Re Sophia-Ri family. It would be profoundly discourteous to ask Sola-Ui again. Besides--he thinks, and unease shifts his stomach--she’s already thought more of Diarmuid ua Duibhne than she’ll ever need to. And so has he.

* * *

This is not strictly true. After another lecture and in his office, and with Waver Velvet on his way out, Kayneth finds himself presented with Diarmuid on his way in. Waver shoulders past Diarmuid in a huff; Diarmuid blinks and watches him go.

“Begging your pardon, sir,” he says once Waver is gone, “what is he so upset about?”

“Mr. Velvet,” says Kayneth, “labors under the lasting impression that heredity is a democracy. Namely: a democracy that favors him.” He has a slight headache, and a souring mood to accompany it. It’s Waver Velvet that always manages this. He is always getting headaches nowadays, and he swears that his memory’s going too--he’s not _forty_ , and he already can’t recall what he was working on before office hours began and Velvet stormed in. And now here’s Diarmuid ua Duibhne again, and never mind remembering. Waver Velvet has the opposite effect on him to Sola-Ui. A world ordered with her at the center is crisp and clear and comprehensible. He doesn’t know what to make of Diarmuid in this cosmology. He hasn’t refined a place for him.

Diarmuid clears his throat and bends over the desk with his papers and his question, and Kayneth studies him again. His age is indeterminate: he must have been beautiful and strapping at fifteen, and he’ll be unchanged at thirty-five, just when the hairlines of men like Kayneth are peeling back from their foreheads--that is to say, ordinary men. Diarmuid belongs to that class of creature beloved of women, and girls, and some men: that faery class that Kayneth is ordinarily given to hate. But it’s not only his beauty that strikes Kayneth. It’s his manner--it’s so _easy_ , even as it’s respectful, so unaffected, so utterly without consciousness. Every boy over the age of twelve knows about the eyes of others. Every boy, except for Diarmuid ua Duibhne, and _that_ puts Kayneth off more than anything else.

The question is an afterthought. Something about magic circuits and genealogy, something that would set Waver Velvet off on a rant. (Kayneth has told Waver that he is no longer welcome in Kayneth’s office if he has nothing new to bring there. He hopes Waver doesn’t comply. Any excuse to drop the boy from his class would be a well-received one.) Kayneth answers Diarmuid’s query with half his mind, with the other half wandering between Diarmuid himself and Sola-Ui and his Nuada-Re Sophia-Ri theory, and he absently says, “I suppose your parents were mages?”

“Oh--” Diarmuid frowns. “My mother wasn’t, actually.”

“And your father?”

Hesitation. “I don’t know, sir. It was--I mean--”

Kayneth is not a chivalrous man, particularly, but even he is moved to save Diarmuid here. “I understand,” he says.

He is a thing to unlock, Kayneth decides: a minor puzzle, and that is what makes him less obnoxious than the fact of a good-looking lad with a penchant for spending his professor’s time. He grins when he gets something correct, which is more often than Kayneth initially assumes. It’s not hard to imagine him delighted with a sporting victory; that’s the kind of life it’s easy to envision for Diarmuid, in fact. It’s hard to imagine him a _mage_. But he glows with power, he’s warm with it.

He sends Diarmuid off with a book. “A primer,” Kayneth says.

Diarmuid traces the cover with his fingers and then opens it up. A light goes on in his expression. “Thank you,” he says. When he looks up he has that ready grin, that confidence. If there is anything dubious in his reaction, he keeps it well concealed: and it is only at this point that it occurs to Kayneth that he may have the capacity for guile.

* * *

He has a board meeting. Sola-Ui waits for him in his bedroom. She has never waited undressed, in all their time together, though he fantasizes about it--but she wears white lace, under her clothes: for him, maybe. He reorients it so that it’s for him. He takes pleasure in the way her brassiere unclasps, though he thinks maybe she doesn’t notice, and in hooking his thumbs under the band of her underclothes. So many little things. It’s white, he decides--she has red hair, there are so many colors she thinks she looks better in, but he likes her in white. He likes her on the bed, lying back, with that look he doesn’t understand. One of many.

Time passes after, languid; she brushes her hand through his hair. She might wind her fingers, he thinks, if it were longer. That’s an absurd thought. It would look ridiculous. “Have you ever thought...?” she murmurs.

He lets her finish her thought, content for once to wait.

She frowns against his neck. “I don’t know what I was going to say,” she says. “That’s funny.”

“You don’t have to know everything,” he says, “all the time.”

He means it besotted, but she takes offense. In retrospect he should have realized. She sits up on her elbows: “Never mind,” she says.

* * *

He doesn’t trust Diarmuid ua Duibhne. One doesn’t get as far in life as Kayneth by trusting people like that. He--well--

He’s lecturing at the podium. Before class begins, he sees Diarmuid immersed in idle chat with another student, a girl, and feels a wave of dismissive contempt. Diarmuid is making a joke, he can tell from his posture, and the girl is laughing or making a point to laugh. Kayneth has never had the knack for that. Either thing. Either telling the joke, or finding it funny--all the little maddening things that go into charm, he has always been able to pick them apart, for all the good it’s done him. Dissecting his own social failures was something of a primary-school hobby. Now he forces himself to look away from Diarmuid and his new friend, and interrupts them all by clearing his throat.

He’s sitting his office hours. He expects Waver Velvet, but he doesn’t get him; perhaps the boy has finally dropped his class, he doesn’t remember seeing him, but then again he’s certain he always sees that head turning a campus corner, when he’s not paying attention. He expects Diarmuid, and he does get him, after a fashion, for a moment: Diarmuid is here to return the book. He has copied it out.

 _What, by fax?_ Kayneth arches a brow.

Diarmuid laughs. A full complement of teeth, all white. _Longhand. I didn’t want to introduce a book of magic to a machine. Couldn’t be sure of the results._ He grins at Kayneth.

 _It’s a primer, not a book of magic. It would be none the worse. Save your consideration for something substantial._ But Kayneth takes grudging note.

_I will, sir, if I ever get there._

It is close to the end of Kayneth’s office hours, and he’s about to lock up and leave. It’s close to the end of the day, too. Diarmuid lingers politely in the doorway as he packs up and walks out. Their paths come together for a while before they diverge. Kayneth supposes Diarmuid is headed for the dormitories, generally, and supposes at the same time that it’s strange for a professor of the Clock Tower to walk a student home. Certainly it’s strange for _Kayneth_ to be taking up the practice.

The air is chilly, freezing the leaves off the branches. Autumn has been a while, Kayneth muses: sooner or later it has got to leave the trees bare. Diarmuid is wearing a peacoat, which he buttons up all the way. Kayneth tries to discern what he can of its make and material, but his own ignorance brings him up short. He has never chosen clothing off the rack. Such a life would never have occurred to him. His life is invisibly fitted and tailored around him. Diarmuid’s clothing is a blank to him, just like the rest of Diarmuid’s life. (Next to him, Diarmuid is walking with his head ducked and making the occasional friendly comment-- _I wonder when autumn will be done with?_ \--to which Kayneth nods or says nothing. It is not the most comfortable walk two people have ever shared. Still neither of them manufactures an excuse to leave.)

Down another walk, across the cloisters, Diarmuid stalls. “This is me,” he says and nods toward a cluster of buildings to the west.

The temptation to keep walking comes over Kayneth. Diarmuid wouldn’t stop him. Diarmuid is in no place to stop him from doing anything. He could see more that way, admit himself to the student courtyard and witness for himself what kind of doorway Diarmuid ua Duibhne disappears into at the end of the day. Yet already the words _student courtyard_ lodge themselves in his mind and with them, the prospect of observation. He’s far from invisible on his own campus: in fact, he counts himself notorious. His image among his students is the product of careful curation over nearly a decade. Altering it with a reckless action would be unthinkable. He’s already come this far in the company of a student, under many possible pretenses, all of which would vanish if he walked him all the way to the dormitory.

He is too preoccupied with this line of thinking to notice Diarmuid, who bows--in the corner of his perception--and then turns to go. “One moment,” Kayneth says abruptly.

Diarmuid waits. Kayneth formulates something to say to him, and settles upon, “You should take the next-level primer. I’ll leave it with the assistant tomorrow.”

They stand there, separated by a few paces. At this distance, Diarmuid is tall: of a height with Kayneth, more or less, with no lecterns or desks to obscure the comparison. His skin is unmarred by adolescence or by anything else; it’s difficult to imagine working up the nerve to mar it. His lower lip is a little fuller than his upper, and he presses his teeth into it as he waits. These are the things that Kayneth notices.

“Thank you, sir,” says Diarmuid.

Sola-Ui’s voice cuts through the air. “Kayneth!” She sounds a distance away. She is, in fact: an approaching blot, waving from the other direction. Kayneth starts, seized by a sudden nauseating panic he doesn’t immediately understand. Then he supposes he’s not a fool. He knows the name of the transgression of which he’s come to the border. He turns his back on Diarmuid and walks away without a word, toward his fiancee, hoping to intercept her. It’s not until he does and puts his hand on her waist that he chances a glance back at Diarmuid: but he’s already disappeared into the buildings, or is not there by some other way. He always finds methods of winking out at the edges of Kayneth’s perception, of his memory. His faery way. At least Sola-Ui doesn’t seem to notice him, and accepts Kayneth’s half-embrace; “Are we going home?” she questions him. “What were you doing all the way out here?”

He’s used to not answering some handful of her questions. He doesn’t think it does any harm.

* * *

The students filing in are greeted by a circle, glowing blue where the lectern should be. This does command their attention. The effect on their interest is basically Kayneth’s only fondness for this exercise: though he’s chosen the same spell every year, something that can’t go awry for him and won’t go disastrously if some fool boy or girl tries to make a copycat of themselves at home, he still doesn’t care for what it encourages in them. In his time, he spent twice as long on theory as they do now; he doesn’t see why they can’t do the same. But after years of trial and error with his lectures, he’s determined--to his own longsuffering resignation--that demonstrating magic for them at this point of the semester prevents the greatest numbers of untried accidents for the rest of it, so he sighs and walks them through the design of the circle. He’s not really paying attention to the students today, his mind absorbed dully in the rote memory of the spell.

They are all absolutely silent by the time he’s finished inscribing the sigils. He hardly has the theatrics for this, he supposes: but there is no one better for the magic. Kayneth speaks the Latin loud and clear into the air and passes his hand over the circle in one broad gesture. He shields his eyes in anticipation of the light the spell will throw up all around him.

Instead the sigils come to life at his feet. He stares down in genuine surprise as they wriggle, break free of their bonds, and float up like glowing two-dimensional fish cartwheeling through the classroom atmosphere. The students are still rapt and silent. Kayneth takes a long moment to realize that this is happening, and a longer one to hold out a hand and snap them back into inanimate stillness.

This is all wrong. This is one of the fail-safes built into the spell for beginner’s error, for mistakes--for incompetence--but Kayneth has worked this spell hundreds of times. He’s done it as a student and as a teacher, at home and in the classroom: it’s a sturdy working, and he chose it for that reason. There’s a great margin for error. There shouldn’t _be_ any error in the first place.

Kayneth extinguishes the spell and the classroom bursts into applause. They have no way of knowing. Not yet. He looks wildly around the room for skeptical faces--looks for Waver, even, who has every reason to doubt him--but Waver’s not here. Perhaps he’s finally dropped. That fills Kayneth with shameful, poisonous relief. Then he casts a glance at Diarmuid’s seat. Diarmuid looks elated; Diarmuid looks--proud, even, with a full grin and a distracted half-clap going with his hands as he stares at Kayneth. As he catches Kayneth’s eyes, he starts to clap harder. He has no idea. Not an inkling, not a clue. And this, finally, is what motivates Kayneth to pretend. He affects impatience with the students’ applause and telegraphs _unimpressed_. Once it dies down he claps his own hands together sharply and begins a revised version of his lecture.

That’s not something he enjoys. He doesn’t do well with extemporanea. He clips through the material anyway, conscious of the eyes on him.

This is not the kind of thing that happens to Kayneth Archibald, Lord El-Melloi, at the lectern. Or ever. He cannot remember a single time he cast anything other than the spell he intended to cast. He cannot _remember_ : a prodigious line of thought. What can he remember, exactly?

He sits down in his office. He is losing his mind. Not in the common sense, he’s not descending into madness. He is merely misplacing the contents of his brain: something that happens to old men, and injured ones, but not this dramatically and not this fast. Not that he would know if it was happening slowly. Kayneth supposes it a miracle that he can even discern it at all.

No. He’s being dramatic. He made one mistake, he reasons. Anyone could do that. It is his own arrogance that has projected this upon the wall in a bigger shape. He sits with this reassurance until it sinks in.

* * *

The rain is a spatter on the glass. Not every office in the Clock Tower has windows, but Kayneth has never had one without them. This is one of the perks of his existence that he doesn’t think too hard about. He hardly considers it a perk at the moment, anyway. Autumn in the city will be what it will. It weeds out the uncommitted, anyway; you can always tell who won’t come to see him when the weather is unpleasant.

But he doesn’t have hours today in the first place. He watches the grandfather clock on the opposite wall, though he doesn’t have to. The whole building chimes the hour. Growing up, Kayneth’s only ambition had been to have an office and a position in this very building. Now he can hardly think of an ambition that doesn’t have the shape of Sola-Ui Nuada-Re Sophia-Ri. She encompasses everything he wants now in life and everything he is striving to do. There is not a thing in the world she could want that he wouldn’t get for her.

… There is something he’s been meaning to buy her, come to think of it. It’s gone now. He curses his own disorganization; he really ought to write these things down.

Speaking of her: she stops by his office with a plate of food in the late morning. A full English, fresh, with no tomatoes. With an umbrella and a charm she’s kept herself and the food dry, which he counts the most impressive magic he’s seen all week; she laughs at his compliment and says, “Kayneth. Just eat it. You’re going to be home late.”

Laughter, from her, is not something he hears often. He tries to preserve the noise in his mind after she’s gone, but it’s difficult to recall exactly.

A few hours later he hears a rap on his office door. He is not expecting one, so he frowns and goes to answer it.

He is not expecting Diarmuid ua Duibhne, either, outside of hours: damp, with a dry book under his arm. The water’s hardly dented him: if anything, it’s just brought out something rosy and wild. Kayneth admits him with a strange look and says, “Don’t tell me you’re finished with that one also…?”

“I came to return it,” says Diarmuid all in a rush. He’s flushed, maybe from the weather, and his voice is strained.”

“Excuse me?”

“I came to return it, sir,” Diarmuid says again. “I don’t understand it. … Because I didn’t read the first one.”

They’re both standing on the office rug. For all that he’s professed his intent to return the thing, Diarmuid has his arms bundled protectively or self-protectively around his book: which is pressed against the surface of his knit vest, which is pressed against his shirt, which is pressed, presumably, against his hot skin. Kayneth is on his feet as well, though dry, and in front of his desk, staring at Diarmuid. Neither seems liable to maneuver to sit down--so this is clearly a conversation Diarmuid intends to have in passing, before he goes away again. But Kayneth is too bewildered to let that happen. He says: “What do you mean, you didn’t read it?”

“I mean,” says Diarmuid, “that I said I copied it, and I said I read it, and I’m sorry, sir. And I’m here to return your book.” He looks stricken beyond measure. But he doesn’t hold it out.

There are a thousand bewildered circular questions Kayneth could put to him. It doesn’t even occur to him that Diarmuid is expecting displeasure; it doesn’t occur to him because he is too busy turning the situation over in his head and trying to make sense of it. Nothing works. There is no way he can account for any of this.

Kayneth holds out his hands instead for the book.

Diarmuid doesn’t immediately comprehend the gesture. He has bitten down his shame with something, as even Kayneth understands it, resembling pride; he looks away from whatever Kayneth has in store for him. So Kayneth prises the book out of his arms and says, “Look at me.”

Diarmuid ua Duibhne looks at him.

Kayneth puts his hands on either side of Diarmuid’s face and kisses him. He cannot say with any excruciating level of accuracy how long he’s been planning to do this, except that the timespan is longer than the past several minutes. Diarmuid kisses back readily, without a moment of confusion--which makes Kayneth doubt him, again, if only for an instant--and with the open grace with which he does everything: with warmth, with care. So much for fancying that something like him could’ve remained a virgin. He knows what to do with himself. Kayneth doesn’t, though he’s fifteen years the senior: he doesn’t know where to put his hands. He settles for hooking his fingers underneath Diarmuid’s shirt and feeling his skin: the softness, the smooth muscle of his abdomen. Being touched there gets a noise out of Diarmuid, who moves a little.

And suddenly Kayneth feels a wave of strange aggression, the urge to scatter the snow in a new drift. It’s something in Diarmuid’s smooth confidence and his restraint. It doesn’t reassure Kayneth: in fact, it opens up a terrible unrest in him. It fills him with a flash of contempt. He digs his fingers into Diarmuid’s wrists; he backs him roughly into the desk.

Diarmuid closes his eyes and lets him. He turns his neck aside to accommodate his teeth. When he braces his legs dutifully apart, he looks up with a wealth of unreadable quiet.

Kayneth pulls away, breathing hard. It disturbs him how undone he’s come. He wouldn’t like to look in a mirror. He distracts himself by searching on his desk, while Diarmuid straightens up, all damnable composure. Kayneth comes up with a book. The first one. He holds it out starkly in front of him.

“I don’t know what the matter with you is,” he says. “Read it this time.”

* * *

Waver Velvet blows through his life one more time, like a little scrap of paper. Kayneth finds him sitting on a low wall fishing a stone out of his shoe. It occurs to Kayneth that Waver must have been staring at him for some time before Kayneth noticed Waver. For once, this is immaterial to him. Let the boy harbor his resentments; Kayneth has other things to worry about.

One of them is Diarmuid ua Duibhne. What they have begun has no shape. Diarmuid comes to visit, in off hours, and locks the door behind him; Kayneth kisses him hard and hisses reprimands at him for kissing back, lest he leave any trace of himself. He denies Diarmuid his neck, in the event of a bruise; he bends Diarmuid backwards over his desk, and pulls his pretty hair if he’s in danger of pressing Kayneth against something. After a few days of this he unbuttons his trousers and stares furiously down at Diarmuid and waits for him to prove himself with his mouth. He does, more than adequately, and Kayneth pulls more of his hair before he’s done--he takes unbound pleasure in being cruel, in being rough, in not touching Diarmuid after he’s finished. For his part Diarmuid submits to this with equanimity and no small measure of self-assurance; when he’s on his knees he stares up steadily, unnervingly, to the point that Kayneth turns his face away with his hand--which is sometimes necessary, anyway, because looking at him can be too much. They cannot have their fill of each other. Or rather: Kayneth cannot. He doesn’t know what there is for Diarmuid to crave.

He’s no kinder to Diarmuid’s essays. Diarmuid is not the dullest student, after all, but he’s not the brightest, either: hard-working, certainly, but not luminous, not extraordinary. Kayneth gets satisfaction out of marking them harshly. Diarmuid takes his marks in stride, along with Kayneth’s unkind words about them. Nothing really digs into him. It gives birth to the impulse to scratch at his surface, as with a coin.

* * *

Kayneth’s nights are filled with research and with Sola-Ui, her company the steadiest point in his shifting life. He has a project--he finds it difficult to explain--but when he’s completed it, the dean will promote him. He explains this to her while she hovers over his chair: “your father will be impressed,” he says with confidence, which seems to bemuse her. Courting her has never been as easy as courting her father. Sometimes Kayneth wonders what is missing in their relationship and sometimes he knows it. But he thinks: he can provide for her. He loves her. He has a life planned out for her. He’s faithful to her--

\--faithful. Kayneth closes his eyes as Sola-Ui passes her hand over his brow. She clucks her tongue. “Less research,” she says, “more sleeping.” She’s not even trying to be seductive. Wouldn’t that be a day.

He brings his bundled findings up the Clock Tower stairs, tucked under one arm. The dean’s office is several storeys above his. The staircase is probably everyone’s least favorite thing about working here. They all have their ways around it; normally Kayneth might let the Volumen Hydragyrum carry him most of the way, but he has a faint aversion to looking ridiculous at the moment. So he makes the trek and finds it an unpleasant wonder how out of shape he is. Age is pressing in at the edges.

Diarmuid would have no trouble with the steps. Diarmuid could probably carry Sola-Ui up and down--which is a thought there is no point in pursuing, so he tells himself not to. Kayneth opens the door to the upstairs hallway instead.

He’s greeted with an unfamiliar corridor, filled with unfamiliar faculty walking and talking. None of them spare a glance for him. He blinks: surely he knows where the head of his department has his office? But evidently not--in fact, he has no idea where he is. His memory glances off every face like it might as well be smooth. The walls are lit with a welcoming, rosy light, and he recognizes nothing.

Kayneth steps back out onto the landing and puts his forehead in his hand. This can’t be happening. He’s still out of breath from the climb, or maybe he’s breathing hard again, he can’t tell.

He goes back down. He goes home.

When Sola-Ui comes home, he can tell she doesn’t expect him back early. It’s not pleasant surprise that quirks her eyebrows up. This is the time she counts on without Kayneth, and to have it infringed upon requires a redirection of her expectations. Normally this is the sort of thing he would care about, he supposes, and which would possibly wound him, but right now-- “Sola-Ui,” he carves an interruption the rest of the way through her thoughts. “I couldn’t find your father’s office today.”

She leans back on the sofa. “What do you mean?” she says: not alarmed, still annoyed.

“I mean that I couldn’t _find_ your father’s office today.” It comes out sharper than he intends. That draws her attention. He heaves a deep breath, puts his fingers to his temple like he might ward off a headache, though he doesn’t have one--he feels fine-- “I was going there to drop off a paper. It wasn’t where I remembered. There was some hall--I thought I knew every academic office in my building. This isn’t the first thing, either. There was a spell--”

“Kayneth.” She might as well be calming a child. “You can always go back tomorrow.”

He looks at her. He is not in the habit of fixing her with long stares--it would be forward, and improper, and too-intimate though they’ve been living together for well over a year--but when he does, she has little choice but to meet his eyes. “That’s not what I mean,” he says.

Sola-Ui purses her lips. Then she gets up and comes over to his desk, next to him. She puts her hand on his forehead. “What do you mean?” she says eventually.

“I mean,” and because he has never come up with more than one metaphor for something in his life, “that my memories are. Falling out of my head. I keep doing things wrong. I don’t recognize anything.”

She smooths her fingers over his hairline. Any moment she is going to suggest something sensible that breaks his heart, like he ought to go to Medical Research and see what cures there are to be had for such things: suggesting in different words that he’s young, certainly, for that, but he’s not _that_ young. Everything he has already thought of. Sola-Ui says: “When did it start?”

“A-- a few months ago,” he supposes, caught off guard by the question. “You know, due to the nature of the thing, it’s a bit--”

“I’ve been having the same problem,” Sola-Ui says.

Kayneth blinks at her.

She screws up her eyes. “Telephone numbers,” she says. “Yes, I know what you think of the telephone, but I mean--I’ve tried to ring several of my friends, but I can’t recall the numbers. And--I can’t recall their names. I thought I was just--busy,” (with what? Kayneth wonders at the back of his mind; he never does know what women are busy with--) “and not getting enough sleep, but I was going to talk to Father. It all started a few months ago. I think. You know, my memory’s not so crisp before that. Do you know,” she coughs a laugh, “do you know I thought I might be…?”

“A few months ago,” he repeats. He digs his fingers into the edge of his desk. Here they are, standing next to one another when there’s a perfectly good sofa just a few steps away. How silly.

The next time he sees Diarmuid, he has a pot of coffee. He pours Diarmuid a cup. He’s never offered Diarmuid a drink before.

If Diarmuid is surprised he skips easily over it. He grins and curls his fingers around the mug: “What’s the occasion?” he says.

Kayneth watches him drink.

Diarmuid is content to wait in silence, but his eyes flicker up when Kayneth stands and draws a sigil in the air with the thumb-tip of his glove. He’s seen Kayneth work magic a number of times now, including in his office, but never without an announcement: never without a demonstration, even when the spell is utilitarian. Count it to Kayneth’s pedantic nature. This time the ward of detection lights up silently: and illuminates nothing Kayneth didn’t already know. Kayneth and Diarmuid stand out in the empty office, and a few of the books with enchanted pages, and some of the stones on the shelves: two mages in a mage’s room. Kayneth makes a curt gesture of frustration, the ward winks out, and Diarmuid says, under his breath, “Lord El-Melloi…?”

“What are you?” says Kayneth.

He crosses around the desk and steps in front of Diarmuid. (Sensibly, Diarmuid puts the coffee down.) He expects some kind of wide-eyed ingenue nonsense from Diarmuid, whatever the guilty do when they’re caught out without their assembled innocence, but that’s not what he gets; Diarmuid stands up straight and guarded, with his eyes downcast--like he’s anticipating a blow. Something about that makes Kayneth angry. He peels off his glove and provides: a backhanded smack across the face, hard in the knuckles. Diarmuid lets his face turn with its momentum. “You should answer me,” Kayneth says.

“I don’t know how to answer you,” says Diarmuid, low. “I’ve told you what and who I am. Everything I know.”

Any theory is useless. For once Kayneth merely wishes he had more insight into the hearts of others. In a moment of self-conscious awareness--rare, at a time like this--it occurs to him he has no idea if Diarmuid is lying. 

He kisses Diarmuid. Diarmuid stiffens--perhaps he understands better than Kayneth does, really, what is going to happen--and Kayneth shoves him back into the desk with more violence than ceremony. Diarmuid has got to be stronger than him, by far; he just digs his fingers into Kayneth’s coat and draws him in tighter, against all logic. He closes his eyes. Kayneth stares at him. He can’t find the word for what he wants to say. What works his way out of his mouth is, “Be _quiet_ ,” hissed under his breath, and he unbuttons Diarmuid’s trousers with his fingers.

What he has to give isn’t service; it bears no resemblance to what Diarmuid does for him every other day. It’s the coarse pressure of his fingers between Diarmuid’s legs, insensitive to heat and softness. It wrings a whimper out of Diarmuid. He doesn’t thrash, like Kayneth sometimes feels like he’s on the verge of doing--his fingers work and bunch on the edge of the desk and his head tips back, baring his throat. It is a great deal of self-command for Kayneth not to put his mouth there.

The heat builds. Diarmuid makes a noise, then digs the heel of his hand into his mouth before Kayneth can. Kayneth adjusts his angle, pins Diarmuid’s hips down harder so he can find the friction--this is easy, he thinks, he feels able, he feels _powerful_ \--and then Diarmuid breathes very hard and he’s wet all over, underneath his clothes, at the junction of his legs. Kayneth extricates his hand; at an inspiration, he says, “Clean it off.” He pushes his sticky hand in Diarmuid’s face.

When Diarmuid’s finished Kayneth is out of breath too. He feels reddened in the face. It embarrasses him. It adds more ire to his curt, “Get out.”

He stares after Diarmuid when Diarmuid goes--a little unsteady on his feet, but with a half-executed bow, as always, his hair ruffled, a blush tinging his cheeks. The forgotten coffee sits on the desk. Always, after Diarmuid leaves, Kayneth thinks he hears something--a bell on the breeze, maybe--but it doesn’t stick to the edges of his perception, it doesn’t stay.

Kayneth leans back against his desk and puts his hand through his hair. He thinks about Diarmuid’s face. Not when he was touching him, but before that--the readiness, the resignation, which bloomed over his face like red. Kayneth thinks about what he’s going to say to him the next time he sees him. He wonders if there’ll be a next time he sees Diarmuid ua Duibhne at all. The divine wind, he remembers. Not every student lasts. It’s not an event.

* * *

Late at night, Kayneth sits at his desk.

What he remembers: his name. Kayneth El-Melloi Archibald. His fiancee, Sola-Ui Nuada-Re Sophia-Ri. They’re to be married in the winter of next year. He’s been hoping to move it up--

What he doesn’t:

It occurs to him, belatedly, that there is no way to make a list of what he doesn’t remember. This is the kind of epistemological joke that really ought to occur to him first. Kayneth bends the quill pen between his fingers, and snaps it in two, and immediately regrets it. It’s a pathetic display of temper. Now he just has ink under his fingernails.

What he remembers: his name. Kayneth El-Melloi Archibald. His fiancee, Sola-Ui Nuada-Re Sophia-Ri. They’re to be married in the winter of next year. He’s been hoping to move it up. He’s been hoping to move it up. They’ve been engaged for--some time. (‘Some time’ is not a memory, Kayneth, he reminds himself. ‘Some time’ is--not a memory--)

He remembers all of his spells. No, he doesn’t. He couldn’t even remember one well enough to cast it without malfunction. He remembers the Volumen Hydragyrum, how he made it--doesn’t he?--where it is. He just… hasn’t had use for it, recently.

He remembers his name. He remembers his fiancee. They’re to be married in the winter of next year. He’s been hoping to move it up, because--

Kayneth nearly falls asleep sitting there. He’s never come close to drifting off at a desk before. It shows an embarrassing lack of pre-planning. Eventually he undresses and falls asleep alone; Sola-Ui isn’t here tonight, she’s visiting her brother. Her brother. Bram. Kayneth remembers that too. He goes to sleep curled around it.

There is no Diarmuid in lecture today: no practical demonstrations for Kayneth to embarrass himself with and no Diarmuid. He’s the first thing Kayneth looks for. It comes as some--relief, actually, not to find him. The last thing he wants is to look him in the face. He supposes Diarmuid’s dropped the class: late enough in the term for a penalty, he imagines. He thinks. He doesn’t know.

Kayneth sits in his office. The maid service brings a teapot and a cup, just one. He pours, and then a knock comes at his door.

Diarmuid looks like hell. Well. Diarmuid never looks like hell, exactly, not in Kayneth’s recollection, but he looks _wilted_ \--like he’s had to drag himself back in on all four legs. Vaguely, Kayneth is aware that this shouldn’t be the order of things, as Diarmuid stands in the doorway with his arms around his schoolbooks, like Kayneth’s first memory of him. Except Kayneth’s first memory is bright. Something has leached the brightness out of him.

 _May I help you?_ is on the tip of Kayneth’s tongue, but Diarmuid breaches the silence first.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

Kayneth looks away. The colorlessness of Diarmuid is too much to stand, he thinks. There is no reason to keep experiencing it.

“For missing class,” Diarmuid elaborates. “Sir.”

After a moment, Kayneth motions for him to sit down.

He ends up kissing him against the bookcase, this time--but they’re interrupted by the chime of the great clock; and Kayneth just about sends Diarmuid home, before it occurs to him it’s time for him to go too, Sola-Ui is expecting him for dinner, and he says brusquely, “I’ll walk with you.” It is his first offer of this kind, though he’s done the action before. Diarmuid cranes his head at him, but they go together anyway, down the forested walk and through the cloisters while Kayneth glances periodically at Diarmuid and remembers the first time they did this. To his dismay, their relationship is now littered with first times, which means there have been repeat incidents. He planned none of this ahead. This is not the kind of person he expected to become.

They are nearing the point where Diarmuid turns away to his own destination, the point where their paths diverge. Kayneth is thinking about the first day of class.

He thinks he sees a shuffle of dark movement behind him, and he turns his head, but it’s gone--and when he looks back, Diarmuid is almost smiling, something he hasn’t done all day, and is about to say something.

Kayneth interrupts him. “Diarmuid,” he addresses him. “When were you born?”

Diarmuid frowns and starts to answer, but Kayneth cuts him off again with: “What made you enroll in the Clock Tower? How did you get here?”

“I--” Diarmuid falters. “I--Lord El-Melloi, I--”

Kayneth takes his hand. Diarmuid breaks off what he’s saying, staring.

“But,” Kayneth says, looking at him. “You remember _me_? Why?”

A line of students shuffles across the walk. Then it traverses the same path in reverse, in the corner of Kayneth’s vision; he glances quickly and they’re young people, individuals, of course, no one he recognizes. He never recognizes anyone any more.

“My lord?” says Diarmuid ua Duibhne.

Kayneth lets go of his hand. He takes a step back.

“My lord?” says Diarmuid again. His voice is shaking. So is he.

What he remembers: Kayneth remembers Diarmuid ua Duibhne. Or at least, he remembers the name, now.

Diarmuid screams.

Kayneth runs. There is no running away from remembering, which comes on not as a tide but as a reinstituted background, something he suddenly takes for granted as always having been there. He runs, though running should do him no good; he runs until he can’t hear the screaming any more, one of the last things he remembers hearing at all, with Sola-Ui’s head in his lap and--Emiya, and his Saber--he speeds up to a sprint, which has his lungs heaving soon enough, and is wheeling through the cloisters when he comes face to face with someone. Someone sitting on a wall.

Waver Velvet is perched there, elbows on his knees. He blinks at Kayneth like a little owl. “I guess this isn’t working out any more,” he says.

Kayneth stops, heaving air. Waver hops down nimbly; “Don’t worry,” he says. “He can’t really hurt you.”

Waver peels himself back upright and cocks his head. “Well,” he continues, “he can’t really _kill_ you--”’

Kayneth tries to piece together the shards of memory, however many of them have piled in front of him now. There is not enough to make sense of. Almost. _Almost. _“Velvet--” he says, in vague warning.__

“But what do I know? I’m just--”

Kayneth grabs Waver by the shoulders and slams him back, hard, against the wall. Waver’s head hits the stone with a _crack_. It’s enough to loosen Kayneth’s grip on him as he halts and stares.

Waver touches his hand to the back of his head. It comes up wet with red. He stares at it too; then he starts to giggle.

Concussion, Kayneth thinks--but the giggle splits Waver’s face into full-blown laughter. He laughs, and Kayneth’s mote of hope and horror blinks away. Kayneth raises his hand and strikes Waver this time across the laughing mouth, and it hardly slows the noise.

“God,” says Waver, chortling: “ _God_! You never do change, do you?”

The walls of the room are deep red now. Deep red, like the color smeared over Waver’s palm: deep red, like Waver’s eyesockets. Kayneth doesn’t remember now what color Waver’s eyes were supposed to be. He’s all in fragments, or his memory is, anyway, and aren’t they the same thing? He hits ‘Waver’ again, like it might do something: hits him like the connection of the back of his hand with the boy’s cheek might be real, if he repeats it enough times.

When he’s finished with that he finds himself out of breath. He half expects to look over his shoulder and find Diarmuid or Sola-Ui staring at him. So he doesn’t look.

The Grail stares back at him, up at him, framed by bobbed hair.

“What are you hoping to accomplish here?” it says, almost kindly.

Kayneth’s of half a mind to hit it again. He was never that kind of person, he thinks wearily: he did everything from a remove. But this was the sort of thing he wanted--

“You wanted to do,” the Grail is saying, and Kayneth struggles to extricate his thoughts. “You always wanted to hurt this boy, didn’t you? Well, I’m afraid he’s not here. Buuu-ut,” it says, sing-song, “you have me. --And you’ll always have _him_.”

 _He’s not here--_ Waver Velvet is still alive, somewhere, and Kayneth genuinely doesn’t know what to make of that-- but all of that is derailed and he snaps, snarls, “Shut up.”

If Kayneth goes to the window right now, he wonders: what will he see? He’s not brave enough to do it. The Grail smiles at him as he walks by, but as he looks back it’s gone: or not gone, anyway, but everywhere, not embodied, the ground he treads and the air he breathes. Where he stops and the Grail begins, he doesn’t know. They are separate beings, he reminds himself. There was once a Kayneth El-Melloi Archibald. There was once a Sola-Ui Nuada-Re Sophia-Ri.

And--somehow, there still is.

Kayneth sits down. Not on his office chair, but on the floor: and the floor melts away.

* * *

He’s sitting on bloodied stone. He remembers this place.

 _She_ is nowhere to be found. That is the first to Kayneth’s mind. But Lancer stands in front of him, eyes shut. There’s blood all down the front and back of him, his own blood, but he’s uninjured. His stained spears are in his hands.

He looks back at Kayneth and Kayneth can see that his eyes are red. Kayneth thinks of scrambling back again, but he knows it’s no use: if the Grail wants to put them together, then they’ll be together.

There’s no Saber, no Emiya, no moon. Just the red Grail-sky.

Lancer--Diarmuid--screams again, that scream-roar that Kayneth remembers; Kayneth wonders not if, but how many times a person can die within the Holy Grail. They will both find out.

Diarmuid is weeping: blood, tears, some kind of disgusting redness as they come together. He closes the distance between them and Kayneth doesn’t bother to get up, or is too frozen to, either way--he sits up with his hands on the stone, and Diarmuid tosses one of his spears aside. It clatters away as he seizes Kayneth by the front of his coat and drags him up, and Kayneth flinches.

“ _Master_ ,” Diarmuid says through his teeth.

Kayneth says nothing. Maybe he could be lightheaded and on the verge of fainting, he thinks; and wouldn’t that be merciful. No such mercy here. Now everything is abominably clear.

Diarmuid pulls Kayneth to his feet. He’s horrifically strong--the muscles work under his skin. The blood is draining from his eyes, but Kayneth can’t look at him. Even when Diarmuid seizes him by the hair with his other hand, he doesn’t look at him. The red is all draining away. He doesn’t know what he’ll find. No. He knows what he’ll find. He remembers.

Kayneth finds his feet and Diarmuid doesn’t let him go. He waits for Diarmuid to kill him. He waits a good while. When he’s tired of waiting, he looks away completely and he says, “Lancer.”

“Hello, Master,” says Diarmuid in a different voice, a bitten one. Kayneth looks at anything else. The Fuyuki sky: red now, like the sunset. Or the dawn.

Diarmuid draws in a long, strained breath, and he lets go of Kayneth. This draws Kayneth’s attention, in spite of himself. He blinks as Diarmuid steps back, and then back again--and he wonders if Diarmuid is going to kill himself all over again.

Instead Diarmuid ua Duibhne bows--a crisp motion, with both his spears--and then goes down on one knee, like it pains him. Like an old man.

Kayneth stares.

After a while he says, wondering at his own steady voice, “I think we’re in the Grail, Lancer.”

Diarmuid takes a deep breath. “I can’t imagine,” he says, “what would have given you that impression.” He adds: “Master.”

That’s new. Kayneth wonders at it, but he is aware Diarmuid is waiting for him--for what? What is he waiting for?

He turns away. When he turns back Diarmuid is gone and the sky is dark again, scattered with stars. Kayneth looks up for a familiar constellation. But he doesn’t wait for one to resolve itself; he stumbles on.

* * *

He finds her wandering the streets of Fuyuki, her blouse stained with her blood. Though he remembers her, reduced to what she was, he still stretches out his hand and calls out her name: and is startled to see her turn, clear-eyed.

Sola-Ui stares at or past him. Then she turns away and keeps walking.

Kayneth stumbles after her. The Grail has left him that much, at least. “Sola-Ui,” he breathes again; “Sola-Ui, wait. _Please_. Oh, God, please.”

She keeps walking. He imagines a question from her: why should I wait for you? And he would say: because I love you. Because I gave up everything for you. You should wait for me because I always waited for _you_.

“Sola-Ui,” he calls out again, higher. “Please. I’ve seen Lancer. I can bring you to him.”

She doesn’t turn. This breaks his heart, for some reason; funny, when it ought to brighten it.

Kayneth catches up with her and tries to take her hand, but she pulls away from him, until he finally says, “Sola-Ui, I’m sorry.”

Sola-Ui glances up at him.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, all in a rush. “I’m sorry I brought us to all of this. Please-- Stay with me, I’ll find something to do about it.”

Sola-Ui says, “There is nothing you can do,” gesturing, “about all of _this_.”

But she stops. They linger, together, and Fuyuki burns.

* * *

There is no Fuyuki or London any more: only the shadowed, towering shape of an empty city, running red. The city is bleeding, from everywhere. The Grail is bleeding, Kayneth thinks--the Grail is collapsing. Everything is very warm. He reaches out his hand to touch it and is confused, vaguely, when it doesn’t come up wet; but what is wet, he supposes, and what is dry? They are under the sea.

Kayneth is sitting on the street; Diarmuid is here too, he remembers, and so is Sola-Ui. They are looking off to the river, or where they remember the river being. Sola-Ui’s head is in his lap and he strokes her hair.

Diarmuid’s back is turned. This is a silhouette Kayneth remembers, standing in front of him at the ready. His Servant. His champion. He is no less handsome in the red sunset glow, but it takes the bloom off his beauty. His spears are tipped in dangerous light. This is half the Lancer that Kayneth remembers, the half that wasn’t his own fear and poison. Let this be seared into his memory, for however long it manages to last.

But Diarmuid is not content to be a tableau, and he turns. His eyes are red-rimmed, not from the light. He inclines his head.

“Diarmuid,” Kayneth murmurs.

Diarmuid regards him oddly, with some pain.

“Lancer.” Kayneth closes his eyes. “Come here.”

A moment’s silence; then an acknowledged, “Master,” and the soft clatter of movement. Diarmuid kneels down next to him with his spears set aside. But Kayneth reaches out and draws him down further, down next to Kayneth with his head on Kayneth’s shoulder.

“We’re dying,” Diarmuid says.

There are half a dozen technicalities Kayneth could bring to bear on that statement. “Yes,” he says and brings his hand to the back of Diarmuid’s head.

“What are we going to do?”

Kayneth rests his chin atop Diarmuid’s head and his hand in Sola-Ui’s hair. “Close your eyes,” he murmurs. And he waits for Diarmuid to do so, but he keeps watching: as the river flares red and darkness begins to devour the sky, as mind and memory fracture again and, finally, they leave.


End file.
